Miller says MySpace will focus on music and gaming to turn itself around

In the early years of social networking, MySpace ruled with the
vast majority of users flocking to the site. As time went by and more
competition from Facebook and Twitter was raised, MySpace started to
flounder in the waves of competition.

Today things are much
different in the social networking space. Facebook is now the clear
leader in the social networking realm and is the largest
social network in America. Many have wondered what happened to
MySpace that caused its fortunes to turn at a time when it was at the
top.

Jonathan Miller, the overseer of News Corp.'s internet
arm put it succinctly saying, "The thing you see in this space
more than anything else is that if you don't keep innovating and
moving forward, you get in trouble. You can't stop. And MySpace
stopped."

MySpace has plans
to regain its former glory, but won’t do so by fixing the plan
that got the social network where it is today. Miller said, "Fix
implies something was broken and you just put it back together the
way it was and [consider] it's fixed. That's the wrong way to think
about it. You have to think ahead."

Rather than try to
tweak an old business plan to work today, MySpace plans to focus on
its historic strengths of music and gaming. The social network
recently purchased online music firm iLike. MySpace also announced a
new music video service and dashboards for artists and record labels
to get data on how well their music is doing on the social network.
MySpace also put tight integration with iLike and iTunes into the new
music offerings.

Miller said, "Everybody in the company
is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum.
Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum
going."

Miller also said that the MySpace system is "too
closed" to external developers and those developers are
particularly needed in the gaming side of the business. Miller also
hinted that MySpace would be unveiling some sort of paid premium
service in the future along the lines of what The Wall Street
Journal has offered.

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